Monday, January 15, 2007

Intellectual Crapola

Often I think about going back to graduate school to get my PhD or another Master's Degree. Luckily, I know people who are still in college and can remind why I left in the first place. The following written by a student studying at Oxford. Her one line rebuttal at the end is spot-on, I think.

fredric v. bogel has now spent 67 pages deconstructing therelationship between satirist, satiric object, and the reader. heobviously thinks he has something very important to say. i beg todiffer. everything he 'discovers' is so painfully obvious. the bestpart is when he spent like 10 pages proving that when you're "here",you're also simultaneously not "there". spectacular! let me break thatdown for you. what he's saying is that since you're in oakland, youare also (at the very same time no doubt) not in oxford. do you get itnow? i know, it took me a couple times too. it's pretty deep stuff.one of his "analogies" may help: "This is why the Lele people, in theCongo region of Africa, do not simply shun the scaly anteater calledthe pangolin, an animal that is in many ways a kind of culturalnightmare since it threatens so profoundly the classificatory systemon which that society is founded. The Lele hunt, cook, and eat thecreatuure, incorporating rather than evading its threateningcondition; in doing so, they seek to acknowledge, and to draw upon,the power of the anomalous, the ambiguous, the self-contradictory".NO. I'M PRETTY DAMN SURE THAT THE ONLY THING THAT THE LELE PEOPLE AREACKNOWLEDGING IS THAT THEY'RE HUNGRY.